State grant aids repair of flood damage

Middletown Area School District has secured a $395,000 grant agreement with the state Department of Environmental Protection that will cover a portion of the district’s costs for replacing high school boiler room equipment destroyed during Tropical Storm Lee.

The grant also will pay part of the district’s costs to replace a HVAC rooftop unit on the high school cafeteria and a lighting retrofit project in the school’s cafeteria.

“The district was required to provide matching funds toward the project costs, which is standard in grants of this kind. One of the grant’s criteria is that the replacement items result in improving energy efficiency,” district business manager David Franklin said.

Franklin said that the district is applying $350,000 of the grant to the boiler room repairs, which is 60 percent of that project’s cost. The district also will recover 48 percent, or $25,000, of the HVAC replacement’s price and 37 percent, or $20,000, of the lighting retrofit project’s price tag.

The district was forced to replace boilers, controls and an electrical panel after 6 feet of floodwaters inundated the high school boiler room last September.